It seems that Bernie Ecclestone, short, not very attractive commercial boss of Formula One is seeking yet more ways of filling his already bulging pockets. The opportunity for controlling even more of the F1 circus than he already controls must be inviting and now he’s trying to use FIA president, Max Mosley’s recent predicament in an attempt to distance the FIA from F1 racing. He has told the Jewish Chronicle in an interview today that “some of the people on the boards of large companies who invest in Formula One are Jewish and they might be unhappy with the allegations about Max. They might decide they don’t want to be involved with Formula One anymore because of it. I completely appreciate why people felt offended by the allegations about Max.”

Although, he added, nobody had removed any funds yet.

That could be because those Jewish businessman who do support Formula One might recognize that the ‘Nazi’ element of the now infamous Chelsea orgy story the News of the World published was just that: allegation and nothing more.

As usual when dissecting a Screws front-page, beyond the core story that Max Mosley engaged the services of five prostitutes – which he doesn’t deny – there are several spurious add-ons that have been applied to produce the story that the smut-mongers of Wapping felt would have the most impact, cause the most outrage and do the most damage to their victim.

In the original published story the only Nazi uniform on display is posed by one of the alleged hookers outside a building that could have been anywhere and Mosley is nowhere in sight. Since it emerged that the video was handled by a “Miss Abi”, who, curiously, is married to a (now resigned) MI5 agent, it looks more likely than ever that the event was carefully staged by the News of the World after the opportunist or job-seeking “Mistress Switch” went and told them Mosley had booked a session.

Max Mosley engaging in sex and evidently a little sado-masochism with five hookers would have been a story for the News of the World, though perhaps not a front page splash. But given his parentage, it must immediately have leaped into the sad, twisted mind of ‘reporter’ Neville “Onan the Barbarian” Thurlbeck (Screws smut-monger-in-chief * see below ) that an orgy with Nazi overtones would provide a humdinger.

It would have been a simple matter for “Miss Abi”, who appeared to be running the show on behalf of the Screws, to encourage her client to utter a few words in German (if the recordings available on the Screws family website are indeed the voice of Max Mosley). They paper would have equipped her with the video camera and sound recorder (although the quality isn’t as good as it would have been if Conrad Brown from Mazher Mahmood’s team had been handling it.) Having decided on the ‘Nazi’ theme – the striped uniforms and so on – it was a doddle for the girls to turn up and do as much as they could to make it look the way the paper wanted it without Mosley smelling a rat, as it were. As is traditional in Screws reporting, it is all third hand, delivered by girls who remain anonymous and some of whom, if not all, were paid for saying what Onan Thurlbeck wanted to hear, embellished with the regular insertion of little weasel words like “torture chamber”. What “torture chamber”? It doesn’t appear in the photos and the video. And there are the usual inconsistencies: The girl tells how ‘he was flogged until he bled,’ although it turns out further down the report that she’s talking about another occasion.

Mosley is quite within his rights to declare that having his bum spanked and having sex with a few women is entirely legal, even if this kind of activity is distasteful to large numbers of people and, frankly, not something I’d go for myself (I hate pain). However, not only was it legal, it was also entirely private. Would the Screws legal boss Tom Crone like to have all the intimate details of his love life plastered across the front of his own rag? I doubt it, but it would be just as much in the public interest as Max Mosley’s perfectly legal sexual shenanigans.

*For further background on Onan the Barbarian,:

Extract from my book, News of the world? Fake Sheikhs & Royal Trappings.

Thurlbeck was the hard-nosed old hack who usually handled the muckier kiss-and-tell stories for whom a sting had gone badly wrong a few years earlier. He’d set out to expose a naturists’ boarding house in Dorset whose owners allegedly offered ‘extra’ sexual services to guests. Having made his investigations, Thurlbeck carelessly forgot to ‘make his excuses and leave’ (in the time-honoured News of the World manner). Instead, no doubt to his eternal regret, he was caught on film begging the couple to have sex while he stood at the foot of their bed, exposed what, in its primmer days, the News of the World would have called his ‘manhood’ and indulged in an unmistakable act of onanism. Since the film was posted on the internet to the delight of his fascinated colleagues, it was inevitable that sooner or later the moniker ‘Onan the Barbarian’, bestowed on him by an uncharitable ex-colleague, would stick.

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